10 Steps to Small Business Email Marketing Success

Email marketing is one of the most popular and effective marketing mediums.

It’s relevant to businesses within any sector and you don’t need a significant budget to make it work wonders for you. To do it well, you will need to invest some time and a little budget in getting it right but in doing so, will result in faster business growth.

Whether you’re going to devise a B2B email marketing strategy or it’s a B2C business that you want to take to the next level, our 10 steps will help you create a formula for success.

Have a clear purpose

Sending out emails with no clear purpose will quickly turn your customers and potential customers off. You’ll be wasting your time and money if you don’t have an overarching objective in mind. Think about developing SMART objectives and having clarity over:

What action(s) do you want your subscribers to take?

Why should your subscribers care?

Who are you sending the campaign to?

How will you measure success?

Know your audience

Spend some time thinking about who your audience is, what they’re interested in and build a plan around their needs and what you can offer to help them succeed to. Try and segment your audience right at the point of sign-up so that you can tailor content specific to them. This might be by simply asking what department they work in, or how they found you.

Have a clear content strategy

Email marketing is an opportunity to build long-term relationships. Don’t simply use email marketing to sell. Instead, tell them a story, share your thinking or interesting industry articles, invite their opinion, ask them for referrals in exchange for a reward. Are there any significant milestones coming up e.g. Christmas, a release of a new product or research etc.? You want to aim for the reader to have an answer to ‘what’s in it for me?

Spend time on creating compelling headlines

A killer headline is a key tool to increase the open rate and 33% of recipients decide whether or not to open an email based on this alone so it pays to spend some time in getting this right. A good headline should be:

Short and simple, not more than 40 characters long.

Be clear on what’s inside.

From a trusted sender.

Not making a false promise

Timing is everything

Think about when your customers are most likely to be online, or needing you. For example, pizza delivery companies tend to send out a lunch hour email, an hour before people’s lunch break. Getting your timing right makes an enormous difference in open and click-through rates.

Research suggests that for content-based campaigns such as raising awareness, the best time to issue emails is Monday and Wednesday mornings.

Keep your design clean and simple

No one wants to receive an email which is hard to read. The design should complement your website and brand so that there is consistency across both channels and cross both text and HTML formats.

Have a call to action

Within your email, make sure you include at least once call to action within the email. This might be a ‘contact us today for a no obligation quote’ or ‘click here for your exclusive offer’. Make these easy to find and simple to use.

Have an effective landing page

If you’re asking your subscribers to click through to another page, perhaps to take advantage of an offer or read a particular blog, make sure that the page they are directed to is clear, easy to use and able to deliver on its promise.

Measurement is king!

Although you may have a fantastically designed template anda healthy list of subscribers – it’s important that analysis is undertaken for every campaign. Failing to do so could cost you subscribers and sales. Analytics tools are readily available such as Google Analytics or in-built insight from the email provider.

Don’t sit on your haunches, test, test, test!

Consider every email as a test and constantly analyse what is working and what is not. The more you test, the better response you get from your campaigns.

While email marketing could seem like an onerous task, if you get it right and your systems and processes up and running it can be a golden key to growing your business.

Contact us today to find out how we can help with your email marketing strategy.